In general, wireless communications systems using beamforming make use of a number of transmit and/or receive antennas and signal processing to create fixed or adaptive transmit/receive beam patterns. The beam patterns may have a directional nature that may result in a performance improvement when compared with unidirectional transmit and/or receive antennas. The use of the beam patterns may yield a transmit/receive gain over wireless communications systems using unidirectional transmit and/or receive antennas.
As such, beamforming has been promoted as a promising technique to increase cell coverage and to improve cell edge spectral efficiencies. However, one main drawback of beamforming is the so called flashlight effect where the channel quality changes between user equipment (UE) measurement and reporting, and NodeB (NB) transmission, due to the changes in the beam pattern of the interfering neighbouring cells.
Other commonly used and typically interchangeable terms for UE may include mobile station, user, terminal, access terminal, subscriber, and so forth, while controller, base station, enhanced NodeB, base terminal station, and so on, may be commonly used terms for NB.
Coordinated beamforming/switching has been suggested as a possible solution to this problem (see C80216m-08—487, Alcatel_Lucent, “Grid-of-Beams (GoB) Based Downlink Multi-User MIMO”, IEEE802.16m, May 2008; NTT DoCoMo, “Proposals for LTE-Advanced technologies”, R1-082575, Warsaw, Poland, Jun. 30-Jul. 4, 2008; and co-assigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/412,624, filed Mar. 27, 2009, entitled “System and Method for Wireless Communications”).
During the development of Long Term Evolution (LTE), there was much discussion for the flexibility to customize LTE to maximize performance in specific environments. Also, during discussions of LTE-Advanced (LTE-A), many suggestions were made to manage interference level by using coordinated transmissions from different cells (see Ericsson, R1-082469, “LTE-Advanced—Coordinated Multipoint transmission/reception”, Warsaw, Poland, Jun. 30-Jul. 4, 2008; Huawei, R1-083236, “Coordinated Beamforming for Interference management in Advanced E-UTRA”, Jeju, Korea, Aug. 25-29, 2008; and co-assigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/534,271, filed Aug. 3, 2009, entitled “System and Method for Synchronized and Coordinated Beam Switching and Scheduling in a Wireless Communications System”). It is well known that as cell size is decreased in an effort to improve spectral efficiency, interference increases.